5 Things A Blogger Should Do Before Over Optimization Hits The Blog hard

The discussion started over a cup of coffee (yeah, anything can happen over a cup of coffee). Three of us, all online marketers and bloggers, were trying hard to reach a definite conclusion as to what this over optimization penalty is all about.

Tim, the most active among us declared that his blog has got nothing to do with over optimization and Google would not dare to penalize it.

A bet followed and he agreed to give us a treat in nearby Starbuck if the traffic on his blog plummets. Well, to sum up things, now we are all enjoying a mouth-watering treat right at the Starbuck and Tim, as obviously, just cannot believe that it has happened.

His blog has been hit hard by big G. He has learnt the lesson the hard way but I do not think you would not want to learn a new lesion in the same fashion.

So, here I am going to share 5 cardinal rule a blogger should obey religiously if he wants to keep his blog insulated from the latest algo shuffle.

1 . Just Read Some of the Titles of Your Posts Loudly

How do they sound? Do they sound a little bit jerky for the ears? Or do they sound like any other normal sentences?

If the tiles of the posts look a little bit odd, I think you need to prune them a little bit so that they look and sound natural.

Let me give you some real life example: for say you are writing on – Mistakes that can cripple your blogging career. This can itself make a beautiful title for the post, but there are some bloggers, like my best friend – Tim, who believes otherwise. He might have used something like this as a title of the page –

Mistakes, errors, that can cripple your blogging, copy writing career

This is bad, very bad. This makes the readers unhappy and the search engine will not treat this favorably.

So, my humble request, do not game with the search engines. Use title that makes the readers happy and believe me search engines will do its work and find your blog whenever it suits the purpose.

However, I am not asking you to forget about the keywords and all that. Nope, certainly not. Rather what I am suggesting is to keep things at natural level. Do not make it look like fishy.

2 . Do Not Go Mad with the Internal Linking of the Blog

Do not make unnecessary changes in the posts or hyper linking excessively as they tend to look fishy.

And for God’s sake do not use tag cloud, they do not serve any purpose in a website apart from stuffing keywords in the website.

Internal linking just for the sake of distributing link juice is not going to give your blog any boost. Do not go overboard while internal linking as this can lead to over optimization penalty. My friend’s personal experience confirms this.

3 . Do Not Extend the Number of Footer Links to the Point of Being Infinite

Keep the number of footer links to logical limit.

And use the footer links for the sole purpose of simplifying navigation and not to stuff some keywords in the footer section of the website.

Do not try to be a smarta** and place the footer texts against the same color background. Google is smart enough to track.

4 . Do Not Write the Same Content in Different Words Just for the Sake of Getting Bigger Pie of SERP Share

It will make your blog look like another spammy site waiting to be nuked by Google.

And for Christ’s sake do not go on adding keywords after keywords in the body content. This could be the primary reason why your website might get a thrashing from Google.

There are some bloggers who are much in the habit of adding a few sentences (sometimes, use Meta description) to increase keyword density which is basically used to game search engines.

My earnest request is to rewrite all the posts that have these worthless articles and make them look as much natural and useful for the readers as possible.

5 . Bad Blogger Habits

If you have been indulging in some spammy link exchange, article marketing, directory submission, blog commenting etc, your blog may find it in a tough corner.

Google over optimization penalty is targeting those sites that are indulging in this practice and that means, you need to get rid off this shit at any cost.

Run Open Site Explorer and then get all the backlinks listed in an excel file. Once you have the complete list of backlinks, you should try to figure out which are spammy.

So, you have list of sites that look spammy and then invest all your effort to get them removed.

Try them and I hope you will have a better blogging career.

About the Author

Michael Evans is a passionate wrier and a social media enthusiastic who is currently associated with – MotoCMS Flash Templates.